Reflections On Discussions In Our Town

Friday, February 13, 2015

In looking at the conversations that surround our selectmen
and school board elections here in Farmington, there are several points that consistently seem to
be missing from our conversations. This concerns me because, as a person of
reason and local taxpayer, it would seem we won’t be able to find solutions if
we aren’t stepping back and looking at everything we are doing. I know being an
elected official is hard. I know it is thankless and frustrating, but we need people
in office who not only can deal with those inevitabilities, but implement new strategies
if we not only want the town to survive, but also to thrive.

Here are four things we don’t talk about or don’t talk about
enough:

1)Discussions surrounding the budget process revolve
around budget cuts, not generating new revenue or replacing revenue lost, with
alternatives. I know this is one of the hardest things for a struggling town to
deal with, but if we do not find new revenue, new marketing plans, and attract families
and new businesses our town won’t have a future. Period. The cycle we are
currently locked in only leads to less public service, less possibilities for
paying for items, less of an ability to weather a financial crisis or launch
bold initiatives. I don’t mind cutting costs if they are unnecessary, but our budget
is quite tight as it is. It is rare to come across something so egregious in
the budget as the expense to pay the library director a five percent raise. I
support our library. I really think libraries are important and think some of
the staff is grand. I was a Trustee and I’m a lifetime friend of the library. I
was also glad this expense caused discussion and was not taken lightly.
Ingenuity, creativity, and growth take investment, investment takes money. I think
many townspeople would like to see more time spent on finding revenue sources. You
can cut and cut and cut, but many of the largest town expenses will stay as
they are, with more expense added on the next year due to inflation of cost or service
prices. Buying down the tax rate and a tax cap are good short term solutions
sometimes, but ultimately with both you are borrowing from our future to create
stability now and both should be used sparingly
if at all, because of that. In my opinion tax caps work best paired with strong,
established revenue streams. They help to keep waste down when waste and avarice
have lots of places to hide. Our budget doesn’t really have many places to
hide. We need specific action plans
around new revenues not grandstanding talk about it.

2)
Officials often publicly ask for more involvement
from others as they end conversations. They ask for more people to attend
meetings. They ask more people to come to town meeting. They ask for more people
to run for positions throughout the town. They ask for more people to run for
office. This would help our town, but those very people know the town and how difficult
it is to get people involved. Not having enough involved people is not a new
problem and it is hardly restricted to our community. Townspeople can add to
the conversation and add ideas, but it is the elected official who is responsible
for translating that into measurable progress. I’ve seen people step up to the
plate and try to be a part of the solution only to be battered by fellow board
members, stifled by their inflated egos, stalled by opposing personalities, or
bullied into not speaking up. It’s one of the drawbacks to the system we have
in place and unfortunately it keeps many people from donating time and energy
to serving on boards. I don’t know how some of the board members can stand to
sit on the boards they serve on. After townspeople come home from working several
jobs, or working thankless jobs, like those in the service industry, I
would think they would have to have very
compelling reasons to help. I’m not sure they see compelling reasons. They watch the meetings on TV, read the minutes,
or attend a meeting and are left wondering why they would want to be a part of
that process. I’ll tell you a story. I was at town meeting one year. I was
behind a person who sits on a town board. They were bragging to another person
how they enjoyed using the silent ballot(a perfectly legal option for any
townsperson), because it held people longer, beleaguered the process, and forced people to get up and vote instead
of voting while seated. I wasn’t surprised, but what if I was a person new to
the process? What if I considered serving on boards and was on the fence? That’s
the impression I’d have of a public servant in our town. In the future I will
serve on other boards I’m sure. I can tell you honestly though that I would not
choose to serve on the three most important boards in town for the reasons
listed above. Actually, if I’m being completely honest you could pay me three
times what my corporate salary was and I wouldn’t be interested.

3)
Our PR issue. Yes, I feel we have one and I feel
it is enormously underestimated.To make
this matter worse we really don’t have anyone dedicated to trying to change how
our town is perceived, presented, and reported on. There is no one to spin the negative Fosters
article or better yet make sure the twelve great things that happened that day
are out where everyone can see them. How people in our town view it and how
other people view our town plays into everything from revenue generation, to community
spirit, to being the deciding factor on whether someone wants to move here from
somewhere else or wants to come back home after college. Since we really want
people to move here and we obviously would like more revenue sources why aren’t
we putting more effort into this arena? Planning how a building will be
replaced or how a new one is built and how that will look is just as important
as banks and landlords owning so many buildings in town and not caring about
how they fair or who lives in them, if anyone lives in them at all. Again,
these are problems that didn’t creep up
overnight, the situations that led to them happened over decades, so they won’t
be solved quickly, but we do need to be working on them if we are to stabilize
our public persona. We’ve had two town surveys while I’ve lived here, asking
what townsfolk would like to see. I know I’m not the only one finding it hard
to match up what we put in the surveys and what we see going on around
town.Our elected officials are dropping
the ball somewhere or the message we are sending is being mistranslated. In
either case I think it makes townspeople feel like they aren’t being listened
to or worse that they are just being treated as irrelevant. I wouldn’t feel I could say that if we had high turn over
on our boards, but we don’t. Same people different day. Just like town meeting.
Same people different day. Or voting day. Same people different day. Very few
new faces. I think our own town folk have begun to believe what everyone else
says about our town. We need someone working on changing that too.

4)
The last thing that weighs on my mind in this
conversation is that sometimes decisions seem to be made by passing on the buck
to another time or place or issue. I looks like we’ve been doing that collectively
as a town for some time. The transfer from
an industrial town to a bedroom community was not kind or without long term
consequences. Many of the old families are gone and the wealth that once was
standard in our community has left with those families. It would have taken a gigantic
effort to replace those investors and benefactors and that just didn’t happen. Maybe
people didn’t see it coming. Maybe people just didn’t care. That’s what I’m
most concerned about. I’m approaching my mid forties now, almost half way
through the cycle of life, if I live as long as my grandparents did. I’m particularly
concerned that some of the board decisions that push off action, commitment, and
revenue generation into the future, endanger the twilight years of people my
age and younger by creating situations where we will not be able or even want to live here, as if every person really has
that choice. I wonder sometimes after seeing decisions at meetings if my future
here is being pulled from under me. Enacting cuts or not pursuing revenue now,
will have serious consequences in thirty or forty years as the problems compound.
Whether by death or affluence, many won’t be here, so it doesn’t matter to them. It is
great to save the day this year, but I have to look out for forty or fifty more
years.

I’m glad we have people that are willing to
donate their time and energy toward board positions and I’m even more grateful
to those that really seem to care about their neighbors and the town’s future. I’m
happy we have many public employees who are very dedicated and committed to our
town.Some of them strive for excellence.
Some surprise me with what they can do with so little. With that being said,
what I’ve outlined above, from what I have observed since I moved here, seems
to show we are far beyond the times of easy answers or short Facebook quips to
get to the heart of our real issues or to find meaningful solutions to our
problems.